'Sherlock': The Abominable Bride
This Special uses its Alternative setting to comment heavily on Arthur Conan Doyle.
This post is part of a series analyzing the BBC’s Sherlock (2010-2017). See the original post.
12. The Abominable Bride (S3 E4)
The best thing about “The Abominable Bride” is the idea; both entertainment and resonance are lacking.
Sherlock’s big trick—the real selling point for it as an artistic endeavor—is how it doesn’t merely update the world, but the character within that world. Sherlock’s Holmes is unique to the modern world, managing to stand out and not belong as Holmes does in the stories—but through different means. To take the consummate Gentleman Holmes from 1888 and plop him into the 21st century would be to write a completely straightlaced procedural; Holmes stood out in 1888 because he was a rationalistic, aloof Man of Science. Now, that character is everywhere. Sherlock’s solution was to keep the impossible deductive skill and boundless knowledge, but drop the Gentleman. Rather than being inscrutable, he is filled with unmitigated gall. Cumerbatch’s relentless assholery in a more sensitized world provides a correlative outlandishness to Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective. It’s faithful by way of unfaithfulness.
The fun pitch of this Special, then, is to pull a reverse: take Benedict Cumerbatch’s character and re-insert him into the original world of Arthur Conan Doyle. How much wilder he must appear in such staid surroundings! How the styles must clash!
Or so you would think. “The Abominable Bride” turns out to be an annoyingly modernized period piece (in more than one sense of the word). Rather than play in this new space and have some fun—arguably the point of a Special—this turns into an overtly political movie, so firmly revisionist that it almost feels like a piece of satire. It’s fun to see the stylings of the original stories return; but they turn out to be just that, stylings.
No attempt has been made to actually set the characters in eighteen-eighty-something. Other than John Watson, who acquires a chauvinist tint to serve the show’s post-MeToo purposes (the special was filmed in 2015). The script is dense with sarcasm and self-aware jokes about the time period; what it is utterly lacking is the formality and flair that make the ACD stories timeless. Holmes himself is unchanged (though in one nice touch, 1880s Benedict Cumerbatch is “Holmes,” first names being less used). Or rather, he’s just a little toned-down, which is exactly what you don’t want. Give me mania! Give me wacky stunts, shooting walls and picking fights! But rather than spice things up, the new context hang limps on Sherlock; if this world has 1880s sensibilities, there would be rich hijinks to be had, but as I say, it doesn’t have them.
Rather if “The Abominable Bride” is up to anything, it is complaining about Arthur Conan Doyle. The plot, which starts out looking appropriately gothic, quickly reveals itself to be a depressingly straightforward vehicle for a host of criticisms of the original tales. It is not subtle: John literally says at one point, “It’s hard to get ahead in a man’s world.” At another point, Mrs. Hudson complains that she never talks in the stories (as if Conan Doyle did not write well-rounded women into his stories, and more effectively than Sherlock writes them on the show). At yet another point, Mycroft states, almost in so many words, men and women are at war and it is the responsibility of men to lose. Watson is the punching bag for all this, but it’s only because the show stops short of actually acknowledging ACD’s existence. To hear this episode tell it, John’s stories (the blog in the future) really don’t deserve our respect, it’s all chauvinist hogwash. Leaving aside, of course, that the stories are so potent and timeless that the BBC made a massively popular TV show one hundred and thirty years later based on precisely these stories.
As often happens with overtly political movies, the politics actually spoil the suspense—when we are introduced to a ghostly bride killing men for no obvious reason, we know far in advance where this road terminates. I’m sorry, Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss, but Feminism is not a plot twist. You have to have, at minimum, one other idea.
Leaving politics aside, however, the mystery just isn’t good. Imagine you were going to fake a haunting. How would you do it? …Yup….That’s pretty much how the oppressed women pull it off here. Annoyingly, this episode, which superficially resembles Conan Doyle a great deal, feels far less like one of the Strand stories than episodes set in the 2010s (For a good example, see “The Blind Banker”). There’s nothing intricate or inexplicable to unwind.
At least, not in this timeline.
For like its protagonist, Sherlock just can’t resist flaunting its cleverness. Only about 75% of “The Abominable Bride” takes place in the nineteenth century, because at a certain point, Sherlock wakes up—from a certain point of view. The show proposes that the case of Emilia Ricoletti, 1880s London, and in fact everything we’ve seen up to this point is a fantastical problem-space. Modern-day Sherlock is obsessing over a quandary, and we’ve been along for the rollercoaster inside his head.
In another show, this move would infuriate me. Sherlock, however, is not cheating, not exactly. The show is only returning to a well-worn move. We typically ride shotgun with Sherlock’s intuitions, seeing some of the world through his eyes. Sherlock doesn’t typically fantasize another world, but this is the man who can talk to John for hours without noticing John isn’t there.
Are the writers doing this just to do it, or does a larger point emerge from the intermingling of timelines? It seems to me that while this was far from necessary, they do, at least, use the trick to answer a question about the character: how does Sherlock handle the impossible? Faced with an impossibility, would Sherlock remain rational? The fact that the show answers no offers some satisfaction, at least to me. The show is always teetering between extremes; Sherlock is, on the one hand, remote and scientific; on the other, he is childish. The Abominable Bride case is Sherlock’s version of escapism—unable to quiet his anger at not understanding, he instead shuts out the entire world and obsessively works a problem. Maybe there’s a touch of semiotics to Sherlock finally confronting the Reichenbach Falls—this never happened to our Sherlock Holmes in the real world, but that doesn’t mean he escaped it. Nearly all the problems Conan Doyle’s detective faced were exterior to him; nearly all the struggles of Sherlock are interior. Moriarty is always waiting at the Falls, no matter how thoroughly Sherlock has defeated him in life. As the show once pointed out, Sherlock takes his own worst enemy wherever he goes.